Receptor

by Alan Glynn

  They arrive at the White Horse Tavern, where Sweeney came with Matt Drake and Mike Sutton that night.

  This time it’s a little different. As Dylan slowly becomes embalmed in whiskey, shot after shot of Old Grand-Dad, it occurs to Sweeney that cortisone is no match for hard liquor, whereas the smallest tincture of MDT-48 would probably be enough to cure a whole roomful of alcoholics. Hangers-on soon arrive, and some genuine friends, too. Sweeney has no difficulty telling the difference, or keeping track, but what he can’t help himself from doing is losing interest and tuning out of various channels of conversation. The atmosphere in the Horse is thick with cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes, but there’s something else spiraling around in it as well—a desperate plume of longing for the finality of defeat.

  Sweeney finds he has no patience for this.

  So, when he sees a chance, he slips away.

  12

  I go to work the next morning and try to wade through some of the stuff that’s been piling up on my desk, but I find it hard to concentrate. I’ve been in a sort of trance since my drink with Kasper Higgs.

  I slip out of the office the first chance I get. I wander around for a while but inevitably find myself back at Proctor’s apartment building on Beekman Place. There’s a different doorman on duty and he eyes me suspiciously as I approach the desk.

  “Ray Sweeney to see Mr. Proctor.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  I shake my head.

  We both know how this will end, but he goes through the motions anyway.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Proctor…”

  Yeah, yeah.

  I decide to head over to Peter Detmold Park. Proctor said he goes there every day. Maybe he’ll eventually show up and talk to me for five minutes while he waits for his dog to take a dump.

  It’s all I want from him. Five minutes, a few answers.

  It’s not much.

  But of course it is. And while I’m sitting on a bench, alone, staring across the river, I have plenty of time to figure out why. Incredible as it seems, Clay Proctor may well be a test subject in an unofficial drug trial, and as far as I can make out, it’s a trial of the same drug that was used on my grandfather over sixty years ago. The thing is, Proctor originally approached me about this, through his daughter, and he seemed eager to talk the other day … but could it also be that he’s operating, in some way, off-label? And that certain people in positions of influence—and many decades his junior—might regard the way he’s currently behaving as reckless? If that is the case, then I’m probably wasting my time sitting here expecting him to put in an appearance.

  I get my phone out and call Stephanie Proctor’s office. Unfortunately, the congresswoman isn’t available. She’s in a meeting. I leave a message. Can she call me back ASAP? Before I get off the phone, I consider asking if I can speak to Molly Boyd. But I hesitate. Then I don’t do it. And I’m not sure why.

  I stay sitting in Peter Detmold Park for about an hour. People come and go with their dogs. I see a few King Charles Spaniels, but no Mitzi. Eventually, it starts to rain and I leave.

  I spend the rest of the day in my apartment, reading. I can’t focus on work, and I can’t seem to make any headway on Proctor (two further calls to the congresswoman’s office get me nowhere). By early evening I’ve had enough and I decide to go outside to get some air. I walk the few blocks to Fifth Avenue, and make my way down the side of Central Park to Fifty-Ninth Street. I’m not far from where Stephanie Proctor lives, and it occurs to me that I could drop by her building and see if she’s home. She’s likely not in. She’s probably out at dinner, or at a fund-raiser. But if she is home, what will she make of me showing up like this? I’ve already left three voice messages and sent her two texts and an email.

  I enter the lobby—another blaze of pink-flecked marble surfaces and gilt-edged mirrors—and get another suspicious look from another suspicious doorman. He’s keying something in at his terminal and is about to ask if he can help me when I hear someone call my name. I turn and see Molly Boyd approaching from a bank of elevators over to the left. She’s carrying a briefcase.

  “Hey there,” I say.

  “Hi.”

  She stops directly in front of me. The doorman goes back to his screen.

  “What are you doing here, Ray?”

  “I need to speak to Stephanie. I’ve been trying to reach her all day.”

  “You and me both.”

  “But…” I look over at the elevators. “I thought—”

  “I know.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “She’s up there, all right, but it’s like trying to talk to a—” She stops, shakes her head. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” I wait. “What were you going to say?”

  “Nothing. I have a big mouth. I should learn to keep it shut.”

  “Huh. Can I go and talk to her, then?”

  “It’s not up to me.” Molly nods at the desk. “You can ask, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope.”

  “No, I guess not. Well…” I look at her for a moment. “Can I buy you a drink instead?”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, you.”

  She shrugs. “Why?”

  “So I can pick your brain.”

  “Ha. There’s nothing left to pick,” she says, pointing to her head. “It’s fried, burned to a crisp.”

  She looks pale and I notice a few freckles around her nose. Her blue eyes are tired, but they still have a brightness to them.

  “How about this?” she says. “I buy you a drink. For the other day.”

  “Sure.” I pause. “How’d that work out, by the way?”

  “Pretty good. Thank you. Though it feels like longer than just the other day. So much more shit has happened since then.” She glances down at her briefcase, then back up. “Where do you want to go?”

  I suggest the Orpheus Room, which is nearby, but she groans.

  “This is an after-work drink, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So let’s go somewhere dark, somewhere dingy.”

  We find a place on Lexington. It’s nearly empty and we sit at the bar. I order a Bushmills and she gets a Goose Island. We swap war stories and start bemoaning the current state of politics. By our third drink, I’m realizing a couple of things. One, I like her, and two, it feels inevitable that I’m going to blow any chance I might have with her by bringing the conversation back to the congresswoman. But weirdly, Molly seems to understand this and she does it for me.

  “Look, that thing I was going to say earlier, about Stephanie?”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Shut up. You’re dying to know.”

  I make a face, relieved, partly because I might find something out, but also because I’m under a bit of a spell now. It’s the physical closeness, the bar-stool intimacy of it all.

  “See?” she says. “But you first. Tell me why you want to talk to her.”

  “I thought this was an after-work drink.”

  “I really don’t know if there is such a thing.”

  I peer into my glass before taking a sip from it. “It’s actually her father I want to talk to. He told me something at that book launch and I need to follow up on it.”

  “Did you not find him at Beekman Place?”

  “I did. But now he seems to be avoiding me.”

  “What was this thing he told you?”

  Either that question was the next in a logical sequence of them, or she’s playing me. And on behalf of the congresswoman.

  I look at her. “What were you going to tell me?”

  “Oh, come on. What is this, quid pro quo?” She laughs. “Have the lambs stopped screaming, Clarice?”

  She started it, but I’m hardly going to say that, am I? Besides, I don’t have to tell her everything. “He claimed to know my grandfather back in the fifties, when they were both young guys, and it made me curious.”

  “Oh wow.” She mulls this over. “That’s cool. Did you know your gr
andfather?”

  “No, he died long before I was born.”

  She holds my gaze but doesn’t say anything. A little pulse ripples through the air between us. I certainly don’t feel like she’s playing me. What I do feel like is leaning across and kissing her.

  But the moment passes.

  “Now, my turn,” she says, and straightens up on her stool. “So, the simple fact is, Congresswoman Proctor’s hit the sauce and pretty hard.”

  “Shit.”

  I wasn’t expecting that.

  “It seems she’s been sober for over twenty-five years. Or had been.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Have you ever noticed, she’ll order a glass of wine but never actually drink it?”

  I think about this and nod.

  “Apparently, it’s a thing, a control mechanism. But not anymore.”

  I shift on my stool. “What set her off?”

  Molly shakes her head. “I don’t know. I thought it was maybe the Rise & Unite bullshit, that she’d gotten a heads-up on it or something, but … that couldn’t have been the reason, because it wasn’t even true, as it turns out. Like you said.”

  “What kind of a state is she in now?”

  Molly lifts her bottle and tips it in my direction. “She’s way ahead of us, my friend. I was up there trying to get her to sign some papers”—she taps the side of her briefcase with her shoe—“but it was no use. She’s incoherent.”

  “Man. Where does that leave you?”

  “I guess we’ll see. Either it’s a blip, and she’ll get her shit together, or it all falls apart. I don’t know. She has plenty of people around her, but we’re all so young…”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Seriously.” She jabs me in the arm. “This is old-school stuff, empty whiskey bottles and overflowing ashtrays. Abusive language. We’re snowflakes. None of us has ever seen anything like it.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Stephanie is obviously in a bad way and I can’t help wondering what’s behind it. But what I’m really thinking about right now, to be honest—all I’m thinking about—is how I want Molly to jab me in the arm again.

  “And you know what the weird thing is?” she says, stifling a yawn. “A part of me is looking at this as an opportunity. If Stephanie crashes and burns and I’m out of a job, then maybe that’s great, because … I mean, is this what I want? This life? There was a time when I thought it was, but I don’t know anymore.”

  “Maybe you just got hitched to the wrong candidate.”

  She considers this. “Maybe. Steph’s a strange old bird, that’s for sure.”

  There’s a pause and then we both laugh.

  “Where do you live?” she asks.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Queens,” she says. “Astoria.”

  “I live ten blocks from here.”

  * * *

  I open my eyes, immediately conscious of the fact that things are a little different—that the air in my bedroom has an unfamiliar fragrance to it, that I’m not wearing anything, that parts of me ache, that I’m not alone.

  But also that my mind is as still and calm as a reflecting pool in a shaded garden.

  I turn and look around. Molly is sitting over by the window, wearing one of my T-shirts, her briefcase open in her lap.

  “What’s up?” I say quietly. I know that we’re on the other side here … the other side of an after-work drink, the other side of a whole night, and that nothing can be taken for granted.

  That climates change.

  She looks over at me and smiles, then goes back to whatever she’s doing.

  “That was nice,” I say after a moment.

  She looks up again. “Very.”

  “I’ll put on some coffee,” I say, rolling off the bed, scrambling for a pair of boxers. At the door, I glance back. “You already at work?”

  “No, I … I remembered something,” she says, throwing me a distracted look over the rim of her glasses. “There’s a pile of stuff here, and I … I’m pretty sure…”

  She goes back to it.

  As I get to the counter, I hear a small yelp from the bedroom.

  “Found it!”

  I put on the coffee and when I turn around, Molly is leaning against the doorway. She has a sheet of paper in her hand.

  “What would you think of a trip to the Russian baths on Thirty-Ninth Street?”

  “What?”

  She waves the sheet of paper in the air. “The Russian baths on Thirty-Ninth Street. Clay Proctor goes there three mornings a week.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I knew I’d seen a reference to it in there somewhere.” She motions back at her briefcase. “It was in an email. Steph likes her emails printed out.”

  I shake my head, still a little confused.

  “It was a few weeks ago, she was going over her schedule, and she mentioned it in relation to fitting in a block of time to see him.”

  I stare at her. “Which three mornings?”

  She looks at the sheet of paper again, then back over at me. “What day is it today?”

  13

  Outside the White Horse Tavern, Sweeney asks himself what all of this is for. Could he be running Ridley Rogan Blanford within a couple of weeks? Sure, he guesses—if he wanted to. Could he take over the New York City Parks Commission from Robert Moses and do a better job? Absurd as it may sound, yes, he feels he could. He feels he could do anything. Because if information and intuition are two corners of this triangle, confidence is the third—the kind you’re supposed to get from drinking alcohol, only multiplied by a thousand and minus any debilitating side effects. It’s how he was able to confront Robert Moses in the first place. It’s how he ended up in a suite in the Waldorf Towers lecturing Marilyn Monroe on the nature of fame and celebrity. It’s how he got Dylan Thomas to confide in him.

  And these were extraordinary experiences.

  Sweeney doesn’t know what they mean, though.

  He wanders aimlessly for a while, torrents of information coming at him, unbidden and unfiltered, but when he finds himself back in Midtown at one point, on Broadway, in the low Forties, something occurs to him, and he slows down. Maybe the wandering hasn’t been aimless after all, because wasn’t it up here, a few blocks on, that Matt Drake was killed? Sweeney is still unclear about what happened that night, about what led up to the accident, but it strikes him now that he should try to figure it out.

  He picks up the pace again.

  First, it was an accident. Some unfortunate guy ran Matt over with his car. But that was only the final link in a chain of events that started back in Mike Sutton’s apartment in Greenwich Village. As far as the cops are concerned, the case is now closed, because whatever drove Matt to run out into traffic may have been bizarre, and may have piqued departmental curiosity, but it was effectively irrelevant. There was no crime and therefore no perp.

  But there was the question of Matt’s possible double-life to consider.

  The whip marks and the rouge.

  Not that this makes any difference to Sweeney. His initial reaction to the news, as relayed by Dick Blanford, may have been one of shock, but that’s not what he feels now. Matt Drake liked to wear makeup and be dominated? Big deal. Presumably he knew what he was doing. So fine. But what if he didn’t know? That’s the point. What if he’d never done anything like it before? What if the stuff Mike Sutton put in his drink caused Drake to flip out completely?

  That’s what Sweeney wants to find out.

  He starts by asking around. He goes into a drugstore and sits at the lunch counter. He orders coffee and gets a conversation going—with the waitress, with the person on the stool next to him. That accident the other week? Fellow was run over? Late at night? You hear about that? He talks to a cop outside on the street and to a guy at a newsstand on the corner. To his surprise, people engage with him. They answer his questions and seem eager to offer up anything they know, which in most ca
ses turns out to be nothing. Nevertheless, by aggregating the snippets of information he does get, Sweeney establishes two things: one, exactly where the accident happened, and two, the direction Matt was coming from when he ran out into traffic. This leads him, in turn, to a stretch along West Forty-Eighth Street, where he suspects he might find one or more of those underground clubs that Dick Blanford said the police had been interested in looking at. It’s the afternoon, so nowhere like that is going to be open, but he sticks around anyway, pacing the sidewalk. Eventually, he settles on what strikes him as a likely spot—an unmarked entrance between an Italian restaurant and a movie theater that in the space of a half hour has two delivery trucks stop in front of it, one unloading cases of liquor and the other kitchen supplies.

  Sweeney hovers around, waiting for the unmarked, metal door to open again, for someone to emerge. Instead, a dapper guy in a suit comes along, from the direction of Seventh Avenue. When he gets to the metal door, he raps on it with his knuckles. As he’s waiting for it to open, he notices Sweeney.

  “Hey, bub?” he says, a little suspiciously. “Can I help you with something?”

  Sweeney steps forward. “This place here, I just had a couple of questions.”

  “What are you, a cop? A private dick?”

  “No.” Sweeney holds his palms up. “Nothing like that. A guy I know died. It was in this neighborhood. He got run over by a car. About a week and a half ago. On Broadway, early hours of the morning.”

  “Oh.” The guy looks down, at his shoes. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He raps on the door again. “But what’s that got—”

  “I think he was in your club that night.”

  “My club?”

  Sweeney doesn’t know why he’s so sure about this. But he is. There’s a loud clicking sound and the door opens.

  “Hey, boss.”

  The guy rolls his eyes. He puts a hand on the door and looks at Sweeney. Then it happens, this thing. It was the same earlier, with the other people Sweeney spoke to—a subtle shift in attitude, like a small light bulb going on.

  The guy tilts his head. “What’s your name?”

  “Ned Sweeney.”

  “I’m Billy Kline.” There’s a pause. “Come on in.”